Monday, August 3, 2009

Unlearning 101: Education

Unlearning 101: Education:St. Louis's Gateway Arch is one of the world's largest optical illusions. It appears to be much taller Gateway-arch than it is wide. The reality is that it is as high as it is wide. The problem is that the illusion can't be overcome just by taking another look -- only an objective measurement will do.

The relationship to unlearning is this: You can't simply rely on what you see to be the sole determinent of truth. In many cases only objective measurement will do.

12 comments:

Optical Illusions are hard to calculate but how exactly do we unlearn them? Also for the video students only took the online one the second time because of the fact that the printed one wasn't there and if the printed one wasn't there it was obviously not that informative for it to be cancelled out of the program list. That's what the students were thinking.

I think that if they saw print and web versus just web they would have thought: "If print is not classed separately it obviously is not that useful." And so they all did not want to pay extra for something they did not even think was a good purchase as it was not important enough to be classed alone. A very conservative way not taking risks. They thought that as they did not know what the printed one was they would not want to buy it.

So are you saying that just be calling print out gives it a perceived value?

That's pretty clever.

My only quibble might be that probably they didn't have the thought "If print is not classed separately it is obviously not that useful" in words. It probably happened so fast that they didn't even know they were thinking it.

So true. Actually on the reading print thing. My hypothesis is that most people never read. They search the net, get what they want, and leave.

Close reading is a completely different skill that very few people have. (including many of the teachers I've met) it's about comparing and contrasting what someone is saying in Print. Then going back and thinking which thing which person said that makes sense.

Like any other skill it needs practice, practice, practice. it's true for a golf game, music and anything else owrth doing.

Michael, i do not know one kid out of all my friends who enjoys reading. I am sure that in the future Computers will be the new age and technology would have developed in terms of computers. Books will be a dying art. No one is going to bother writing a book anymore. Its all typing now and ideas and what would be books will just be posted on the internet.